That is powerful truths and I love it.
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So, has anyone here read/endured Finnegan’s Wake? And how do people feel about it?
I have not. James Joyce sounds like a chore. But if there were a group available to me who were slowly reading through one of his books, I think I could get onboard for the community aspect of it.
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I started it once. I’m open to reading it in a group.
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I have not read it… I’d like to one day, though.
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Just look at it!
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My psycho ex binges on HGTV, and they ALL do this when showing off the finished renovation. It’s annoying as hell!
Currently reading Charlie Stross’ Laundry Files series, after finishing Dune Messiah again, and appreciating the story much more this time around.
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I insist on more cat to properly appreciate the scale
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Paul Auster is, I think, weirdly huge in Europe. Particularly non-English speaking Europe. He was what many Europeans thought of when they thought of American litfic. I didn’t really get him myself, I hated at least one of his books so much I put it down in anger unfinished. This makes me want to get his new one though. Get well soon. Man that’s a tough few years.
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Thanks for this. I too find his popularity perplexing. The Music of Chance was a nice title, but the story struck me as shallow and facile. I read a few others, but felt the same…emptiness. A detective novel in which he’s a character who gets a phone call from himself seemed clever, but little more. Maybe this one gets somewhere better, since it’s about his own serious struggle.
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All I can say is, who?
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Quick update here, I have just stopped reading Charlie Stross for the Wienersmith’s book A City On Mars finally arrived.
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I’d have to read all of them to confirm my theory, but could this be one of those cases of “You’ve got to read the translation; it loses a lot in the original.” ?
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You may be on to something there!
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Ok, this is Spice. She wandered in and took over two years ago sometime between the release of Dune and Halloween (hence the name). She don’t take no shit from no cats who may have already been living here, neither.
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I listened to Britney Spears’ new memoir, read wonderfully by Michelle Williams. Britney’s family put her through hell if her account is to be believed.
It’s a straightforward kind of feminist statement, which is nice, but Britney and her ghostwriter don’t struggle with complexity much, at all. I kept thinking hmm, this is glossing over all sorts of details. Her father does sound ridiculously confining during a 13-year conservatorship. While Britney admits to being wild at times and getting drunk once in a great while, when it comes to more hardcore substance abuse, she admits only to taking too much Adderall, and later, over the counter “energy boosting” pills. At one point, her father dumps her in rehab again for a couple of months, supposedly just because he catches her taking them again. And that causes the very expensive cancelation of a tour. Hmmm. Would he do that, if he’s only using her as a cash cow, as Britney says in the memoir? Yes, it’s easy to believe that her family has been awful to her, but then, I do wonder what she’s left out that doesn’t portray herself as a mostly innocent victim.
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This book sounds interesting.
Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences.
America runs on women—women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo.
Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.
Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country’s social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women’s labor as the reason we’ve gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women’s work maintains the illusion that we don’t need a net.
Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.
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What a lovely kitty! Torties are awesome! Plenty of pics of mine here
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